by some one else, and that they were but a mask for those "grand possessors" who, seven years before Shakspere's death, owned the play of Troilus and Cressida ? In fact, a skeptical mind can see, even in the verses which face the portrait of Shakspere in the Folio of 1623, the undercurrent of a double meaning. They commence: The figure that thou here seest put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut. Is the word gentle here, a covert allusion to Shakspere's ridiculous and fraudulent pretensions to "gentle" blood, and to that bogus coat-of-arms which we are told he had engraved in stone over the door of New Place in Stratford ? Wherein the graver had a strife' With Nature to out doo the life. No one can look at that picture and suppose that B. I. (Ben Jonson) was serious in this compliment to the artist. Appleton Morgan says: In this picture the head of the subject is represented as rising out of an horizontal plane of collar appalling to behold. The hair is straight, combed down the sides of the face and bunched over the ears; the forehead is disproportionately high; the top of the head bald; the face has the wooden expression familiar in the Scotchmen and Indians used as signs for tobacconists' shops, accompanied by an idiotic stare that would be but a sorry advertisement for the humblest establishment in that trade. If this picture "out-does the life," what sort of a creature must the original have been? O, could he but have drawn his wit As well in brass as he hath hit His face, the print would then surpass All that was ever writ in brass. This thought of "drawing his wit" is singularly enough taken from an inscription around another portrait-not that of Shakspere, but of Francis Bacon. On the margin of a miniature of Bacon, painted by Hilliard in 1578, when he was in his eighteenth year, are found these words, "the natural ejaculation, probably," says Spedding, "of the artist's own emotion": Si tabula daretur digna, animum mallem if one could but paint his mind!' 1 The Shak. Myth, p. 95. 2 Life and Works of Bacon, Spedding, Ellis, etc., vol. i, p. 7. Let us read again those lines: O, could he but have drawn his wit As well in brass as he hath hit His face, the print would then surpass All that was ever writ-in brass! That is to say, his wit drawn in brass would surpass, in brass, all that was ever written. Is not this another way of intimating that only a brazen-faced man, like Shakspere, would have had the impudence to claim the authorship of plays which were not written by him? And that this is not a forced construction we can see by turning to the Plays, where we will find the words brass and brazen used in the same sense as equivalents for impudence. Can any face of brass hold longer out?1 Well said, brazen-face.* A brazen-faced valet.3 It seems to me there is even a double meaning to some of the introductory verses of the Folio of 1623, signed Ben Jonson. The verses are inscribed To the memory of my beloved-the Author-Mr. William Shakespeare— and- what he hath left us. What does this mean: "what he hath left us"? Does it mean his works? How could Ben Jonson inscribe verses to the memory of works-plays? We speak of the memory of persons, not of productions; of that which has passed away and perished, not of that which is but beginning to live; not of the Soul of the age! The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage! In the same volume, on the next page, we are told, For though his line of life went soon about, The life yet of his lines will never out. Could Ben Jonson inscribe his verses to the memory of works which, he assures us in the same breath, were not "for an age, but for all time"? Can you erect a memorial monument over immortal life? What did William Shakspere leave behind him that held any connection with the Plays? Was it the real author-Francis Bacon? 'Love's Labor Lost, v, 2. 2 Merry Wives of Windsor, iv, 2. 3 Lear, ii, 2. And this thought seems to pervade the verses. Jonson says: And again: Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were To see thee in our waters yet appear, And make those flights upon the banks of Thames, That so did take Eliza and our James. That is to say, Ben Jonson expresses to the dead Shakspere the hope that he would reappear and make some more dramatic "flights". - that is, write some more plays. Such a wish would be absurd, if applied to the dead man, but would be very significant, if the writer knew that the real author was still alive and capable of new flights. And the closing words of the verses sound like an adjuration to Bacon to resume his pen: Shine forth, thou Starre of Poets, and with rage Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage, Which, since thy flight from thence, hath mourned like night, And despaires day, but for thy volumes' light. The play-houses had the manuscript copies of the Plays, and had been regularly acting them; it needed not, therefore, the publication of the Folio in 1623 to enable the poet to shine forth. If the "drooping stage" "mourned like night," it was not for the Plays which appear in the Folio, for it possessed them; it had been acting them for twenty years; but it was because the supply of new plays had given out. Hugh Holland says on the next page: Dry'd is that vein, dry'd is the Thespian spring. How comes it, then, that Ben Jonson expresses the hope that the author would reappear, and write new plays, and cheer the drooping stage, and shine forth again, if he referred to the man whose mouldering relics had been lying in the Stratford church for seven years? X. BEN JONSON'S TESTIMONY. It must not be forgotten that Ben Jonson was in the employment of Francis Bacon; he was one of his "good pens;" he helped him to translate his philosophical works into Latin. If there was a secret in connection with the authorship of the Plays, Ben Jonson, as Bacon's friend, as play-actor and play-writer, doubtless knew it. And it is very significant that at different periods, far apart, he employed precisely the same words in describing the genius of |